A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO, my roommate asked
me if we could host a placenta dinner.
A San Francisco–based group called Adventures in Dining had
a placenta donor (an anonymous one; I never learned her name)
and needed a location for their adventure.

I said yes. How
could I not? Admittedly, I was more intrigued by the mise
en scène than by the primary ingredient of the proposed meal.
What types of people attend placenta dinners? Is it a somber
occasion? Formal? I imagined women in long gowns, chic yet
ceremonial, sipping wine and murmuring quietly about their
mysteries. I thought it would be magic without being dorky,
something a style magazine might call “metro-Wiccan.”

The
dinner was canceled. We were told, rather cryptically, that
the designated placenta had been tainted with formaldehyde.
I suspected a hospital worker — someone unaccustomed to women
wanting their placenta food grade. I knew a kid in high school
who smoked formaldehyde for its PCP-like effect. The thought
of ladies smoking placenta and moonwalking around my living
room was oddly appealing, but getting high was not the point.

Once I realized my curiosity over the nature
of placenta diners would not be satisfied, it struck me that
I didn’t really know what a placenta was. I’d imagined some
kind of moist, translucent fetus wrapper. When I saw a photo
of one, I was shocked. A placenta is a huge thing, one-sixth
the size of a newborn, and it looks like a handbag made of
blood. In case I’m not the only one unfamiliar with procreative
miracles, a placenta is an organ that grows inside a woman,
connecting the fetus to her uterine wall and allowing the
developing creature to feed and eliminate waste through the
mother’s bloodstream. That may seem obvious and natural,
but I can’t help feeling that it’s weird to suddenly grow
a disposable organ in which to keep a person you’ve never
met.

In the United States, placentas are typically
treated as medical waste. Some hospitals hold them for a
couple of days, but most throw them out immediately, which
struck me as a reasonable thing to do with a used sack of
blood. Then I began to read about people around the world
who believe these organs contain powerful, protective, and
sometimes dangerous spirits. That we throw such organs in
the garbage along with hypodermic needles, cheek swabs, and
tongue depressors was starting to seem sad and lame. After
all, placentas have been eaten; buried; burned; marched in
parades; sung to; dressed in clothing; entombed in pyramids
(of their own!); floated down rivers; stolen; sold; used
to curse, bless, cure, and beautify; been talked to; not
talked in front of; taken on trips; given gifts of pens and
needles; taken to school; fed; stabbed; used to make art
prints; turned into teddy bears; tied to the heads of children;
and probably a host of other things too strange or mundane
to record.

In
Deuteronomy, God threatens the Israelites for 54 chapters.
He says a woman “will begrudge the husband she loves and
her own son or daughter the afterbirth from her womb and
the children she bears. For she intends to eat them secretly
during the siege and in the distress that your enemy will
inflict on you in your cities.”

The Compendium of Materia
Medica, a tome by the famous 16th-century Chinese physician
and pharmacologist Li Shih Chen, recommended a mixture of
human milk and placenta as a treatment for chi exhaustion,
a condition characterized by cold sexual organs and premature
ejaculation.

Despite these examples and claims on numerous
maternity websites that placenta eating is an ancient custom,
there is little documented evidence of what doctors and academics
call “placentophagy” until the mid-19th century, according
to Dr. William B. Ober, author of Notes on Placentophagy.
After that, anthropologists, doctors and nurses, missionaries,
and writers noted a long list of cultures ingesting placenta.

Placentas have been eaten, buried, burned,
marched in parades, sung to, dressed in clothing, entombed
in pyramids, floated down rivers, and probably a host of
other things too strange or mundane to record.

The Kurtachi of the
Solomon Islands preserved placenta in a pot with lime powder
to flavor areca nuts. In Jamaica, placenta tea was given
to infants who were being bothered by ghosts. In Peru, chewing
the umbilical was said to prevent illness. The Araucanian
Indians of Argentina gave it in a powdered form to sick children.
The Chaga of Tanzania dried it for two months and then ground
it with plants to be eaten by the child’s elderly female
relatives as porridge. The Kol tribe in central India believed
that if an infertile woman stole a placenta and ate it, she
would become fertile, but an injury would occur in the family
from which it was taken. In Hungary, women tired of childbearing
would burn it and secretly feed the ashes to their husbands.
In Java, Moravia, and Morocco, placenta was eaten to increase
fertility. The Chinese used placenta to hasten labor. In
Italy, it was thought to induce women’s milk flow and reduce
pain. Austrians considered it a cure for epilepsy and sold
it in pharmacies. In the 1960s, Czechoslovakian nurses reported
that Vietnamese immigrants ate placentas fried with onions
after giving birth. In Romania, eating it was said to keep
away the cold. And Germans reportedly mixed placenta with
butter.

In 1983, Mothering Magazine published a
series of placenta recipes, including ground placenta pizza.
Right now, women are eating their placentas in YouTube videos
of home births. Even vegans eat it, though not without some
controversy.

A surprising number of modern women and
even a few men espouse the benefits of placenta eating. In
2006, Tom Cruise told Diane Sawyer that he was planning to
eat Katie Holmes’ placenta. Placenta-loving websites like
momlogic.com and placentabenefits.com will tell you that
placenta contains oxytocin, a hormone associated with pain
relief, orgasm, pair bonding, and relaxation, sometimes called
the “cuddle hormone.” Placenta is also said to contain progesterone
and vitamin B6. It is believed to be good for preventing
postpartum depression, stimulating milk flow, repairing the
uterus, stopping hemorrhaging, and getting silkier hair.
All these online testimonials made eating placenta seem like
downright sensible nutrition. But I had yet to hear a first-person
account from someone who’d eaten it.

Figuring the modern
incarnation of this practice must have caught on in the 1970s,
I called Jacqueline Darrigrand of San Francisco, a self-described
feminist who wrote her master’s thesis on witches, did a
back-to-the-land stint, and doesn’t flinch at organ meats.

“Hi
Mom. Did you or any of your friends eat placenta?”

“What?
I’m walking down the street. I can’t hear you very well.”

“PLA-CEN-TA.
Did anyone you know eat placenta?”

“Oh! Ha! No one I know
did it, but I heard about it happening. It’s supposed to
be very nutritious.”
“Did you want to eat our placentas?”

“I can’t say that I was
tempted, no. Anyway, I don’t think that was offered to me
as an option.”
“Do you think it’s gross?”

“Nothing is grosser than giving
birth.”

I called Sean Uyehara, a San Francisco
film programmer whom I knew had a child.

“Did you eat your
kid’s placenta?”

“No. The hospital kept it. I think they
ate it themselves.”

“You think they made Jell-O?”

“Probably
some kind of headcheese.”

Finally, I was given the phone number
for a known placenta eater. When I talked to Kim, a professional
photographer from Massachusetts, she sounded personable,
open, and humorous, not really my idea of an auto-cannibalizing
pagan. She said that after giving birth, she had lost a lot
of blood and was feeling weak. Her midwife asked if she would
like to eat some placenta. She agreed, and her midwife sautéed
it and served it on a plate with onions and eggs. “At the
time, I was kind of delirious from blood loss and delivery,”
she said. “Mostly I look back and am grateful for how it
made me feel after a hard labor and how surprisingly normal
it felt.” Of the flavor, she said only that it was “not strong.”

Paul
Reller, an acupuncturist in San Francisco, told me that he
ate placenta while in acupuncture school. “A lot of the other
students were freaked out, but I ate some,” he said. “It
was dried and shaped like a little flat cookie. It was extremely
tasty, sort of sweet.”

I heard that Christina Buckingham,
a performance artist sometimes known as “Chaos Kitty,” had
eaten hers, so I called her too.

“Hi, I know we haven’t talked
for a while, but I have kind of a funny question. Did you
eat your placenta?”

“I was going to, but I got too grossed
out. I think maybe I overcooked it. I slow-cooked it all
day and the smell was nauseating.”

“What was the smell?”

“Like old yak meat,
kind of gamey. I think maybe I shouldn’t have frozen it first.”

“Who
were you going to feed it to? Were you going to have a dinner?”

“I
wanted to feed it to my husband, but he wasn’t interested.
It’s hard to do things like that when you have a cynical
husband.”

In the background, I heard the high-pitched
voice of a toddler and then my friend saying, “I wasn’t going
to eat you! I might eat you now, though!” Then a little voice
laughing, “But I’m full of bones!”

From what I could gather,
making a tasty placenta dish is not easy. The recipes I found
online and in books were mostly Italian-American family dishes
like lasagna, calzones, and spaghetti. To my mind, cooking
placenta in a sloppy red sauce and adding cheese does not make it more appetizing. Here’s an example of a placenta
lasagna recipe, this one I copied from a website called mothers35plus.com:

Method
Use a recipe for lasagna and substitute this mixture for
one layer of cheese. Quickly sauté all the ingredients
in olive oil. Serve. Enjoy!

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, a chef from
the U.K., scandalized the country in 1998 by making placenta
pâté and serving it on his TV show Cook on the Wild Side.
According to BBC News, the placenta donor’s husband had 17
helpings but the other guests were less enthusiastic.

The
descriptions I read and heard of placenta’s taste were wildly
diverse, everything from sweet to salty, like liver, not
like liver, like filet mignon, textured like heart but more
spongy, like offal, like eating a plateful of garden earth.

Even
though I never got the opportunity to host a placenta dinner,
all this talk of flavors and organ meat had me wondering
about an appropriate wine pairing. I asked Gus Vahlkamp,
sommelier for the Slanted Door, a renowned restaurant in
San Francisco known for its iconoclastic wine list. He responded
in an email:

“After a couple of conversations with my
peers (and people who have handled placenta, though never
eaten it), we think the best all-around recommendation would
be a red wine with minimal oak, high acidity and pronounced
mineral overtones, rather than ripe, primary fruit flavors.
If we were going for complementary pairing, the best choice
I think would be a wine made from mencía, a grape variety
indigenous to northwestern Spain; mencía is vinified in many
different styles, but the best ones for our purposes come
from Bierzo, where the wines are known for their earthy,
sauvage notes and fairly rugged character. Jon Bonne from
the San Francisco Chronicle has written that these wines
actually remind him of blood.”

CYNTHIA
MITCHELL makes
moving pictures, still pictures, and pictures with words. She
lives in San Francisco.